Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader [Paperback]

When you talk to many people about missions, you can see that what comes to mind is a safari jacket and a pith helmet. How does one explain missions to somebody who still thinks in terms of Tarzan movies? Well, I would give them Perspectives on the World Christian Movement. It is, I'll admit, a massive book. But then again, missions is a massive subject.

Winter is admirably suited to handle the task. He has been a missionary, and has been a big influence in missiology for decades, most notably in placing the stress on "unreached peoples." He is also one of the founders of the United States Center for World Mission, and one of the most brilliant men I have ever met. (He visited Vancouver to speak at a missions conference in 1981.)

Part of Perspectives is Winter's own work, but large parts of it consist of original source material, dating right back to William Carey, the father of modern missions (hence the name of the publisher.) The topics include a sweeping history of missions from New Testament times to the present, a discussion of what missions means, and a look at the unfinished task.

Perspectives is so huge and complete that it forms the basis for a college-level course, which is taught in Christian colleges, and by extension all over the world. But it certainly stands reading on its own, and should be in the library of every church, Christian school, and mission agency, and every pastor's study. It's long past time that the pith helmet image was updated.

I first bought this book as a required text for my seminary class "Intro to Global Missions," and I can honestly say that out of the many many books I've had to buy for my seminary career, this book remains as one of the single most important.

The book is broken into four major sections, labeled:

The Biblical Perspective
The Historical Perspective
The Cultural Perspective
The Strategic Perspective

Each of these then has dozens of articles written by authors such as Brother Andrew, Walter C. Kaiser Jr., Greg Boyd, John Piper, John R. W. Stott, Hudson Taylor, and many other excellent authors.

Not to use a cliche, but you'll both laugh and cry as you read through this volume and read incredibly diverse accounts of the Christian experience around the world like you can in no other book I know of. This book definitly helped me break out of my very limited frame of reference, and really opened my eyes up to the state of the world...